For anyone with an interest in the fate of images, Hito Steyerl’s work is indispensable. Based somewhere between Berlin and the internet’s subconscious, Steyerl is equally adept at writing as she is at filmmaking, and is an influential professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Books such as The Wretched of the Screen, and installations like Factory of the Sun at the 56th Venice Biennial of Art, have cemented Steyerl’s status in a lineage that includes Harun Farocki and Chris Marker. No one quite manages to historicise the recent present in the way that Steyerl does, summoning philosophy, politics and popular culture with deadpan precision and deadbeat humour. Duty Free Art, Steyerl’s latest book, is published by Verso and is out October 2017.